A Call To Do Better

With two series of Doctor in the House and several appearances on the BBC Breakfast red sofa under his belt, Dr Rangan Chatterjee is a familiar face on our TV screens. He talked to Louise Wates about his approach to medicine and why he believes that addressing lifestyle factors is in keeping with the Hippocratic oath to do no harm

- Louise Wates

Despite his popularity on-screen, Dr Rangan Chatterjee from the BBC series Doctor in the House is swimming against a tide of medical convention. After series one in 2015, he was criticised by The British Dietetic Association for getting a patient with type 2 diabetes to remove from her diet foods (such as wheat) that are known to spike blood sugar quickly, and to focus on getting five vegetables per day for a short period of time. (The patient got better.) Shortly before our meeting, his name comes up in conversation with a dietitian who, again, criticises Rangan’s approach, even though it worked.

But Rangan isn’t alone; there are doctors around the world who are taking similar approaches to nutrition, some in the face of criticism. Yet he says there is increasing evidence to show how nutrition can influence health. Doctors, he says, are also “increasingly recognising that not everything they do is working”.

Last year, Rangan used the TED stage to present How to make diseases disappear in which he mentioned some diseases that are currently considered incurable.

“TED talks are about big ideas and big concepts,” he says. “I get the potential controversy, but I want to change the way that we look after our patients.

“Is it possible to make every disease disappear? No. Can we do better than we are already doing? Yes. Can we do a little bit better? No, we can do a lot better.”

Doing “a lot better”, he feels, will benefit patients and the NHS, which is buckling under the strain of lifestyle diseases. But he didn’t always see it that way; it was a family crisis that changed his perception of medical practice.